About Artificial Content/Traffic

You may have seen many articles about artificial content and the Dead Internet Theory - AI generated text, pictures, video and audio churned up and spat out from other sites and sources, fake videos, and more. You may even have seen, shared or watched some without noticing. Or you may be puzzled as to why people do this.

While some of it's generated for fun, and a smaller amount to create political or business mischief, there's often a simpler reason: ad fraud. Tricking humans into clicking on useless content will still rack up the banners, video plays, SEO metrics and tracking pixels that get the spammers paid. Sometimes they don't even bother with humans, and use artificial bot networks and "click farms" to simulate them.

Make no mistake, this is fraud. Ad networks and advertisers pay for real traffic and real engagement on real content, neither of which these practices provide. It also stops that money getting to real creators like podcasters.

However, the ad industry is rapidly getting better at detecting it, analysing both content and traffic and flagging anything suspicious. So are we.

To be absolutely clear:

• The use of "artificial content" - including but not limited to AI generated and/or computer-voiced content - is against our Terms and Conditions.
• The use of "artificial traffic" - including bot farms, "traffic boosters" such as hidden playback on advertisements or autoplay audio piggybacked onto other sites, is against our Terms and Conditions.
• Use of either of these techniques directly harms creators and businesses.
• Both we and our partners are developing increasingly sophisticated tools to detect and flag such content and traffic.
• If you are found to be using either of these methods, or other means of attempting to circumvent our or our partner's ad technologies, your account and content will be removed without compensation and we will consider further action against you.